Originally Posted by
Doctor Bifrost
Comics are a nostalgia game these days, and you shouldn't be surprised. I started reading DC in 1959. Barry Allen was my Flash for many years.
And yet, I'll be honest. I didn't feel "robbed of Barry Allen for 20 years." He died in Crisis on Infinite Earths....
(Or in the CoIE-like event that happened in the DC SingleVerse... I love CoIE, but the aftermath was a mess, due to - in my opinion - thoughtlessness and poor editing. Barry died in CoIE, and everybody remembered him sadly. Supergirl/Kara Zor-El died in CoIE, and in the SingleVerse she never even existed and almost no one remembered her. If they had simply said, "Oh, in our new SingleVerse, which of necessity had a different version of CoIE, Barry Allen never died at all!", it wouldn't have been a contradiction...)
... then Wally West/Kid Flash took over the role. That didn't bother me at all. I was, in fact, more bothered when they played time-travel games to show Barry alive in the future. (Not because I didn't like Barry. But because it trivialized the story of his death, and because DC didn't have any time-travel rules to help you make sense of character relationships under these circumstances. And still don't.)
As it happens, I was a big fan of Wally West/Kid Flash. I always had a fondness for the Original 5 Teen Titans, and I liked Wally's adventures with Barry. (It was better after they gave him his own costume.) But I never really took to the Wally-as-Flash stories, or character. Not because I didn't like Wally, but because they kept having these arcs that veered in every direction. Look, he has to eat all the time! Look, he won the lottery! Look, he has twin kids who he brought up at superspeed so that they're already, like, young teens! (Without any consideration of the psychological effects that would have on him, or them.) It didn't feel like character development to me. It felt like throwing spaghetti against the walls to see what would stick.
(Yes, I am aware that there were arcs that many readers loved and that made Wally their favorite character. They are entitled and I am genuinely glad for them. Tastes differ.)
Now, when The New 52 came along, I - as someone who had followed DC and their "continuity" for many years and had generally given them a break - did feel robbed, of Barry and Wally both. This Barry was boring - maybe the Barry of 1960 had been boring as well, but we had come a long way from that. Also, I strongly dislike the angsty, guilt-ridden "my mom was murdered and my dad's in jail" Barry Allen. Not every character has to be given a tragic past.
And the way they brought back Wally - trapped in the Speed Force, forgotten by all, breaks free, some people get their memories of him (but not of everything) back, some people don't, some people have two sets of memories, maybe his adventures took place in the current timeline but were forgotten/erased (but if they were erased, did they take place?), maybe they took place in a parallel world but... - typifies a lot of tropes I dislike about "fixing continuity" in modern DC. (I want continuity to be fixed. Just not by limitless chronobabble.) The Flash used to be a series about a man who was very fast, and in particular could run very fast, and ultimately found ways to travel through time and other dimensions, and learned that his powers were connected to something called the Speed Force. Now, I would say, it is a series about time travel and dimension travel (without much in the way of comprehensible in-universe rules) and the Speed Force (which is, alternately, a concept, a source of power, a connection between speedsters, a place you can visit and even live in sorta like Kauai, and a sentient plane - and then there's the Reverse Speed Force...!), which has a bunch of very fast people in it getting lost and tossed around in those concepts. And I know some people love all that, but I'm not one of them. (I am more likely to say, "Show me that you can handle one universe in a narratively compelling way, and we'll see about giving you a few more..." All the stuff they're doing these days such seems like so much hand-waving to me. And as for how they tortured poor Wally after that...)
So: I don't hate Barry. I don't hate Wally. I disliked The New 52, which I think messed up both characters. I wish when they went to Rebirth, they would have just wiped out The New 52, or moved it to a parallel world, and created a new continuity that restored the things that worked pre-Flashpoint and adding/subtracting what they thought necessary (and let us know).
And if that had simply brought Barry back to life (as happens in comic books) into a world where he had died and Wally had become the Flash in honor of him, and now the two old chums would have to work out how they wanted to work together (and deal with the naming rights), instead of constantly trying to somehow explain and rationalize The New 52 at the same time that they were getting rid of it. (Wally was non-existent for all of The New 52, so as we adjust reality for Rebirth we have to explain why he was gone all that time? No, you don't. Just adjust reality so that he wasn't gone. Much easier, and better for fans of both.)
(As for Wonder Woman, the fact that they spent many issues explaining that her New 52 life was something like a gods-induced delusion - "The Lies" -that she believed for many years when she was an active hero, mixed with holodeck-like encounters with fake gods conjured by the real gods to support the delusion, and now we're going to let you, and her, in on "The Truth" - oh, DC, why do you do these things to yourself? And your characters? You're changing reality. Just make "The Truth" Diana's truth, and don't keep around The New 52 stuff as hallucinatory, psychological baggage that you'll never want to refer to again anyway. But I think we're three iterations beyond that Wonder Woman anyway.)
But that's just me.
And yes, I read lots of Barry Allen from early Silver Age days on, although perhaps not the Showcase issues, and maybe not the first issue of his own comic, which was interestingly enough called Flash #105. I suspect I caught up on those later.